Forget the iPhone: 3 technologies that actually mattered in 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008 | 07:43 AM ET
By Jesse Brown, CBC technology columnist.
Smartphones are sexy and mobile internet combined with GPS could one day have a big impact on the way we talk, create and organize. Throw in iTunes’ App store - or better yet, a fully open-source alternative like Google Android, and the implications could indeed be massive. But it hasn’t happened yet. For all of the hooplah, smartphones remain shiny, convenient gadgets - not global gamechangers.
Why?
Because not enough people have one yet. Big things only happen once technologies are cheap enough (or free enough) to be everywhere. When your great-aunt has an iPhone, that’s when you know that the world has changed.
With that in mind, here are the three boring old technologies that made things interesting in 2008:
- Text Messaging
Yup, dull old SMS rocked 2008. It’s how Obama raked in the cash and got out the vote, and it’s how millions of people created a global, first-response peer-to-peer news network without even trying to. In 140 characters or less, the world texted and tweeted breaking information on every major crisis, including the attacks in Mumbai and the riots in Greece.
- Anonymizers
Internet censorship is alive, well, and creeping. China, Iran - and now even Australia - are among the many countries blocking or planning to block thousands of sites. But as millions of Chinese know (and as hundreds of journalists covering the Bejing Olympics learned), barriers installed by armies of technicians and bureaucrats can be bypassed with a few deft keystrokes. Anonymizers and proxy blockers such as Freegate, Tor and Psiphon are still geeky secrets in North America, but everybody knows them well in countries where they need to. - Bittorrent
To its corporate foes it’s a bandwidth-guzzling, piracy-powering menace. To its 160 million users it’s simply the best way to move big files of all kinds around. But hidden in this p2p technologies’ code is an elegant, disruptive philosophy: by putting content distribution into the hands of content consumers, the economics invert and the more popular a file becomes the easier and cheaper it is to move around. With implications like that, no wonder Net Neutrality is a brewing war. Look for this one on next year’s list too.
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Comments
Chris
Montreal
Nice picture, a little background into what happened to the "phone" would be nice.
Not everyone has a smartphone yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if by this time next year carriers offered only smartphones.
I expect the smartphone to make next year's list.
Posted December 19, 2008 12:03 PM
j
toronto
Tech wise, the Iphone didn't matter. It doesn't actually do anything new, and will distract people from the better products that already exist. Apple has finally turned the tables on Microsoft using the same dirty tricks ( as far as the Iphone goes), and it made me feel dirty as I bought my new Mac.
These days, Steve Jobs=Bill Gates. Except, I'm still not afraid of viruses, but the clock is ticking. Sell your Apple stock now.
Posted December 23, 2008 03:59 AM
Mack
China
To Chris in Montreal: You may love your i-phone but there a dozens of better phones here in China at a third of the cost. Many people here had the features of i-phone before Apple released theirs. A portable multi-media communication device is already here.
Posted December 29, 2008 04:04 PM
Corey
Burnaby
to j Toronto:
What products are better than the iPhone? I would like to know. What dirty tricks are Apple pulling? How are they evil now?
If you feel so dirty in buying your Mac, why did you? The iPhone (like the iPod) doesn't do anything new, but it does what it does a lot better than anything else that has been produced in North America. I do say NA because cell phone companies have for the longest time done whatever they could to stifle innovation.
How far advanced would the Windoze PC market be if it weren't for Apple? Windows wasn't any good until at least v3.1. Nearly every OS that MS has released has been completely different from the one that came before. Win98 is different than ME, is different than NT, is different than XP, is different than Vista, will be different than Win7. Apple has had one desktop OS since 2001. That means fewer bugs and issues.
A lot of companies have tried to duplicate the iPhones capabilities of late. I haven't seen anything that can compete with it on ease of use, power, size and price.
Posted January 2, 2009 02:59 PM